Standards for What?

Standardized tests have nothing to do with preparing students for
what they'll do when they leave our schools.

The latest rage in education is standardized
tests. Tests have been around for a long time, of course, but have
never been employed to the extent they are now. Young people are now
being tested and then retested a year or two later, and then retested
again and again. Our schools are morphing into test-taking factories.
Politicians like tests because they don't cost much money and they
reassure the public that children are at least learning something.

Paradoxically, we're embracing standardized tests just when the new
economy is eliminating standardized jobs. If there's one certainty
about what today's schoolchildren will be doing a decade or two from
now, it's that they won't all be doing the same things, and they
certainly won't be drawing on the same body of knowledge. The purpose
of education is not only to train people to become productive
participants in an economy, of course. And yet, the work that people
will do after they leave school has a necessary bearing upon what and
how they learn.

Jobs in the old mass-production economy came in a few standard
varieties: research, production, sales, clerical, managerial,
professional. A system that depended on economies of scale didn't need
many different specialized skills. Nor did it need much original
thinking. Most people spent most of their working lives performing the
same operations over and over, in the company of many other people who
performed the same or similar operations. A standardized education was
appropriate because jobs were standardized. In general, the largest
pedagogical challenge was to train young people to sit still for long
periods of time, be patient, follow directions, and be punctual. These
were the core competencies that industry required.

But the old mass- production system is disappearing. Computers, the
Internet, and digital commerce have exploded the old job categories
into a vast array of new niches, creating a kaleidoscope of ways to
make a living. Musicians, artists, writers, and performing artists are
discovering multimedia outlets for their talents. Large numbers of
people in the United States and elsewhere are starting their own
Web-based businesses and auction houses. People who had been clerks and
secretaries are turning into spreadsheet operators, desktop publishers,
and Web- based inventory-control managers. Salespeople are becoming
specialty technicians, finding or creating unique products to meet
particular customer needs.

There's also an increasing demand for people who provide personal
attention and comfort. This includes an upsurge in advisers,
counselors, coaches, and trainers. Physical and occupational therapists
are needed. Home health-care workers, elder-care assistants, and
child-care workers are all in short supply. And we have a chronic need
for teachers at all levels, able to improve people's skills throughout
their lifetimes.

Success in any of these jobs doesn't depend on mastery of one
uniform body of knowledge as measured by standardized tests. Quite the
opposite: Most of the work in the emerging economy requires an ability
to learn on the job, to discover what needs to be known, and to find
and use it quickly.

Many of the new jobs depend on creativity—on out-of-the-box
thinking, originality, and flair. Almost by definition, standardized
tests can't measure these sorts of things. They're best at measuring
the ability to regurgitate facts and apply standard modes of analysis.
Yet in the new economy, facts and standard analyses can be uncovered at
the click of a mouse. Information is efficiently stored in bits and
bytes. So it's less necessary to know a lot of particular things. It's
far more important to learn how to identify and solve new problems,
think critically, and challenge assumptions.

Other jobs in the emerging economy depend on the ability to listen
and to discern what other people are feeling or what they're needing.
Advisers, counselors, and consultants must be able to hear beyond the
words that other people are using, and diagnose what's really going on.
Empathy is becoming a critically important skill. Here again,
standardized tests are often irrelevant.

Many jobs depend
on creativity. Standardized tests can't measure these sorts of
things.

Yes, of course, the emerging economy requires that people read and
speak clearly. They also must know how to add, subtract, multiply, and
divide.

Standardized tests can help measure whether children have achieved
an adequate level of communication skills and numeracy, and even help
pinpoint where children need more guidance. But in many other ways, our
new obsession with standardized tests runs exactly counter to the new
demands of the modern economy. It is training a generation of young
people to become exquisitely competent at taking standardized tests,
and a generation of teachers to become exceedingly good at teaching how
to take them. Neither of these competences has much to do with
preparing young people for what they will encounter when they leave our
schools.

The more disturbing prospect is that all the testing may have the
opposite effect—dulling young people's interest in learning and
dimming their creative sparks at just a time in history when learning
and creativity are more important to the economy than ever before.

Robert B. Reich, who served as U.S. secretary of labor under
President Clinton, is the university professor of social and economic
policy at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. His latest book is The
Future of Success.

Robert B. Reich, who served as U.S. secretary of labor under President
Clinton, is the university professor of social and economic policy at
Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. His latest book is The Future of
Success.

"Testing: Setting the Record Straight," a policy brief from
Achieve,
argues in part that "States face significant challenges in ensuring
that their standards and tests are as good as they need to be but the
way to achieve the goals we share is to make the tests better, not get
rid of them or put them off until they are perfect." (Requires Adobe's Acrobat
Reader.)

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